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LETTER: To deny science is to deny God-given gifts

By Jacksyn Bakeberg from Spearfish on May 24, 2014 at 9:21 p.m.

To the Editor:

On May 16, a letter to the editor was published titled, “God ultimate controller in climate change.” The letter, riddled with Bible verse citations and references to eternal damnation, explained how, “As sin continues to abound … there will be more and more climate and earthquake disasters allowed by God, not carbon emissions.”

This reminds me of a story told in the most recent episode of “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.” It speaks of ancient Mesopotamia, the fi rst great civilization of the world. To support their relatively massive population, they developed an advanced irrigation system that flooded their fields every year. The problem arose when the water evaporated and left behind its salinity. Over the years the salt accumulated, and began killing their crops.

This, in combination with drought and war, led to the demise of the first society.

Today, we live in one global civilization. The difference between us and the Mesopotamians is that we know what our demise is. We know that we are pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We know that this has a heating effect, and that this is causing the frozen poles to melt at alarming rates. If we spend our lives praying to fix problems we can easily fix ourselves, our society will collapse upon itself, just as the Mesopotamian civilization did.

To paraphrase astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: I don’t care what you do at church, but when you come knocking on my science classroom and tell me to learn it, expect me to be up in your face. When we begin actively denying scientific fact — like the relation between carbon emissions and global temperature — we throw away God’s greatest gift: intelligence.